Cataloguing / Storing Photos

How do you all deal with your images? Try as I may mine are always in need of sorting.

I use at the moment Elements organiser and I am sure that it works well for organised people, at one time and totally against my nature I had everything nicely organised when my hard drive bit the dust.

Once the new one was fitted and the Elements reloaded I was horrified to find that although I had all my data it was impossible to remember the tags etc I had used before, so I guessed and now I have hundreds of photos with illogical tags. I am working my way through but wonder if I am making my life difficult for myself and if there is an easier way.

I simply have a pictures folder and folders within it that have the date and a short description in the title

Then I have another folder which I call 'resized' and these are the images that I have resized for the web and posted on here

Also makes it really easy to repost old images, as I just need to look in the resized folder and change one of my photobucket URLs to the new name - no need to go hunt for it on photobucket :mgreen:

Similar to Azz, I have categories for example 'Animals', 'Landscape' etc. Then each trip which generally involves 1 kind of piccie taking is in a folder named with location and date. I use Iphoto on the mac's to set up so each trip is in its own album.

I don't generally rename pic or put tags on them, just label the folders.

I have a folder for the pics that I'm fiddling with in PS and a folder for prints.

Everytime I unload my card, all the pictures from that batch go into their own folder, and each folder is numbered in consecutive order.

From there, I delete the blurry ones, or the ones that are certainly not worth anything. Then I use the software my camera came with, ZoomBrowser EX to tag all of the photos.

Then, when I am sure all of the pictures from the card are in the folder on my hard-drive, I clear the memory card.

Finally, I upload the batch to PhotoBucket and I have them resized to 800x600.

And I upload my best shots to my FlickR account for public display.

Anytime I edit a photo, I immediately save a copy in a folder called "Edits" (I save the copy before I do any edits... so I don't accidentally overwrite the original).

I also have a folder for images that are going to be printed.

Thank you for telling me your methods, must admit mine seem complicated in comparison and I think I must change my ways.

I forgot that I was planning to do this, but earlier today I bought a program from a friend for dirt cheap: ACDSee Pro 2.

He stopped using the program and he sold it to me.

Currently, it costs $64.99 US if you buy it from the company:
http://store.acdsee.com/store/acd/en...uctID.78701700

So far, it is GREAT. I have yet to explore and have fun with it, but it seems really neat and powerful.
It easily allows you to tag and categorize images. You can also create e-mails, generate HTML galleries, upload directly to Flickr and a ton of other neat features, including some basic photo editing and effects.

They also have a lower version: http://store.acdsee.com/store/acd/Di...uctID.78701300